Look Out For Lefty was not the first football story in Action. The opening issues featured Play Till You Drop by D C Thomson old- timer, Ron Carpenter. This was drawn by Barrie Mitchell, who went on to do the first four episodes of Lefty. Mitchell preferred drawing the Carpenter story, because it involved adults rather than kids, and he found them more interesting to draw. When he decided for personal reasons that he wanted to go and work in Spain, the work passed to a close friend of his, Tony Harding. They had been apprenticed together and had both worked on Thomson's Scorcher. The basic look of Lefty was established by Mitchell: "Play Till You Drop was basically good over evil. I suppose in a way Look Out For Lefty was. but it had more of a disregard to authority. I think I based Lefty on someone, he was a cross between a young Dennis Law and George Best." Lefty was in fact written by Tom Tully, the man who for twenty years has written the squeaky-clean Roy of the Rovers. It is a measure of how much writers have to, and can, write to order that he was able to produce two such different kinds of story. Lefty, as you'll see, is very much the down-market version of a football hero. With a Grandad taken straight out of Steptoe & Son, the story always walked an edge of humour. But Lefty's own character was the real change from the traditional football story which Tully usually wrote. At the same time as live football was seeing the emergence of the superstar - and the newsy pages of Action were carrying small stories about some of them - Action was running a story about a talented but unstarry character desperately trying to break into a Third Division side. It was the well-heeled, well-connected character who got the First Division apprenticeship. This was, of course, its Action mark. Action's heroes were - not simple anti-heroes - more, struggling-to-survive heroes, against (among other things) their own backgrounds, and against their own limitations and problems.

Look Out For Lefty was one of the more popular stories. This is surely because of its difference from the traditional soccer stories. The action of the story isn't just the goals and glory on the park - though those are there. More, Lefty's life off the field is the centre of attention. He has a girlfriend - and what a tough `un she is, a skinhead, not above clouting Lefty if he starts taking her for granted. He has his Grandad who keeps getting drunk, and doing bizarre deal,,. Crowds in Lefty were anything but cheer-leaders for the great and good hero. They are partisan, nasty - and of course there were the Rotherfield mob who gave him much aggro.

Tony Harding, its main artist, mildly remembered it as being a rather "cheeky" story, the one in Action with a reasonable degree of humour. Lefty would get into scrapes, and end up doing things like making V-signs at the crowd (though Harding objected and cut these from the script). But apart from that. Harding had few memories of the scripts - even including the notorious "bottle" incident, as he was away from London, living on the Isle of Wight. (This is different from Mitchell who, for a time, actually worked in the Action office, along with Mike Dorey the Hellman artist. This contributed to the hot-house atmosphere of the comic.) Harding was therefore very cut-off from the row that was brewing; and his scripts kept arriving very late - sometimes rushed to him by Red Star for virtual overnight return. All he did remember was that the guy who got clunked was "such a horror" that he had no sympathy with him. For the rest, the sheer rush of getting the artwork done on time, under pressure, made it merge into a background haze!

When the storm blew up, Lefty was of course a principal target. On October 8. Tony Harding got a phone call from Ian Vosper at IPC (who knew Tony well, and must have been drafted in to help with the internal transition) to say that they were hoping to keep Lefty in the comic if they could ride out the storm. But it didn't sound too certain. Then, on October 29, came a call from new editor Sid Bicknell, announcing he was now in charge and could Tony gear up for the new scripts? If they had arrived late before, now they were like telegrams, for instant response. And all that cheekiness did a bunk.

Still, this was all in the future. For its first series, Lefty was as you see it here: an unconventional story about an awkward, bad-tempered, struggling cuss of a working-class lad, with great potential on the park but great problems off it. And there was Angie...